Tom's Projects 'n' Stuff

The inner workings of the pinball machine will be controlled by a microprocessor. I have chosen the propeller processor by Parallax, http://www.parallax.com/ the same as what Ben used on his Bill Paxton Machine. It has a very good community with forums and sample code to help anyone get started. I purchased the P8X32A-Q44 SchmartBoard Kit which is a cheaper option but you have solder it all together yourself. And the parts are TINY!

The processor runs at 80Mhz and has 8 cores. Meaning i can run different parts of the machine at the same time. For example Input/Output on the first Core, Sound/Music on another, and Video on another core. You connect it to a PC with a USB cable and upload all your code into it. Once uploaded you can disconnect it from the PC and use to run nearly anything you like.

So after a few late nights of soldering… checking the circuit with a multimeter… cursing… resoldering… rechecking… and resoldering. I managed to get it to…

…Make a LED flash on and off! Woo hoo I thought! As I was now off to the creation of a very complicated computer (for me) for a pinball machine.